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The Baroque guitar replaced the Renaissancelute as the most common instrument found in the home.[2][3] The earliest attestation of a five-stringed guitar comes from the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish book Declaracion de Instrumentos Musicales by Juan Bermudo, published in 1555.[4] The first treatise published for the Baroque guitar was Guitarra Española de cinco ordenes (The Five-course Spanish Guitar), c. 1590, by Juan Carlos Amat.[5][6] The baroque guitar in contemporary ensembles took on the role of a basso continuo instrument and players would be expected to improvise a chordalaccompaniment with another basso continuo instrument playing the bass line.[7] Intimately tied to the development of the Baroque guitar is the alfabeto system of notation.

Three different ways of tuning the guitar are well documented in seventeenth-century sources as set out in the following table. This includes the names of composers who are associated with each method. Very few sources clearly indicate that one method of stringing rather than another should be used and it may have been up to the player to decide what was appropriate.

^Harvey Turnbull, The Guitar (From The Renaissance to the Present Day) (3rd impression 1978), London: Batsford (ISBN 0 7134 3251 9), p. 15: "Early lutes, vihuelas and guitars share one important feature that would have been of practical concern to the player; the frets, unlike the fixed metal frets on the modern guitar, were made of gut and tied round the neck" (Chapter 1 - The Development of the Instrument).

^Donald Jay Grout, A History Of Western Music, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1962, Chapter 7: New Currents In The Sixteenth Century, p. 202: "By far the most popular household solo instrument of the Renaissance was the lute."

^Tom and Mary Anne Evans, Guitars: From the Renaissance to Rock, London: Paddington Press, 1977, p. 24: "The first incontrovertible evidence of five-course instruments can be found in Miguel Fuenllana's Orphenica Lyre of 1554, which contains music for a vihuela de cinco ordenes. In the following year Juan Bermudo wrote in his Declaracion de Instrumentos Musicales: 'We have seen a guitar in Spain with five courses of strings.' Bermudo later mentions in the same book that 'Guitars usually have four strings,' which implies that the five-course guitar was of comparatively recent origin, and still something of an oddity."

^Evans, Guitars (1977), p. 24: "We know from literary sources that the five course guitar was immensely popular in Spain in the early seventeenth century and was also widely played in France and Italy....Yet almost all the surviving guitars were built in Italy....This apparent disparity between the documentary and instrumental evidence can be explained by the fact that, in general, only the more expensively made guitars have been kept as collectors' pieces. During the early seventeenth century the guitar was an instrument of the people of Spain, but was widely played by the Italian aristocracy."

^Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music In The Baroque Era (From Monteverdi to Bach), London: J. M. Dent & Sons (1st UK edition 1948), p. 26: "The basso continuo ... required at least two players, one to sustain the bass line (string bass, or wind instrument) and the other for the chordal accompaniment (keybooard instruments, lute, theorboe, and the popular guitar)."